Interviews with journalists are often dismissed by academics, because the pressure to simplify one’s ideas is so great—both because time is short, and in order to make complex ideas comprehensible to an audience not used to taking in long chains of abstract reasoning. Interviews do need to be treated with care, because the interviewee usually has no control over the final editing, which can remove important qualifications or imply that a comment relates to something altogether different from the context in which it was made. Nevertheless the need to respond to the questions and challenges of interviewers provides an opportunity to clarify misunderstandings and meet objections. In that spirit, I have included below a composite “interview,” which is an amalgamation of two separate interviews given in the aftermath of my appointment to Princeton. To an interview by Bob Abernethy for the Public Broadcasting Service program “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” shown on WNET-TV on September 10, 1999, I have added some further questions asked by Nell Boyce, for an interview that appeared in New Scientist, January 8, 2000. Where I found my responses to their questions less felicitous than I would have wished, I have taken the opportunity to clarify or amplify what I said.
BOB ABERNETHY: Let’s start with some of your basic ideas. You say that a human being, a person, doesn’t necessarily have value because of some intrinsic quality of just being a person; but what’s important are certain qualities. What are those qualities?
PETER SINGER: First, it is important to say that in my view it is a human being, not a person, who doesn’t have value simply in virtue of belonging to the species Homo sapiens. Species membership alone isn’t enough. The qualities that I think are important are, first, a capacity to experience something—that is, a capacity to feel pain, or to have any kind of feelings. That’s really basic. But then that’s something we share with a huge range of nonhuman animals. In addition, when it comes to a question of taking life, or allowing life to end, I would say it matters whether a being is the kind of being who can see that he or she actually has a life—that is, can see that he or she is the same being who exists now, who existed in the past, and who will exist in the future.
I use the term “person” to refer to a being with that kind of self-awareness—in the words of the philosopher James Rachels, a being who can live a biographical life and not merely a biological life. A person has a lot more to lose when his or her life is ended than a being that is conscious, and can feel pain, but nevertheless is conscious of its existence only moment by moment, experiencing only one moment of consciousness and then the next, without understanding the connection between them.
BA: Some of your critics have accused you—on just that point—of abandoning the entire Judeo-Christian tradition regarding the value of human life. What do you say to that?
PS: I accept the accusation. I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition has an unjustifiable bias in favor of human beings qua human beings; to that extent it needs far-reaching revision. If you look at the book of Genesis, you see there the idea that humans are special, that God created humans in his own image and gave them dominion over the other animals. Since Darwin, at least, we’ve known that that’s factually false, and now we’ve got to draw the moral implications of understanding that it’s factually false.
BA: Okay, the idea that many of us were raised with and cling to is that each human being is a creature of God, has intrinsic worth because of that, and that there is a sanctity, therefore, to human life. How do you deal with that?
PS: I don’t believe in the existence of God, so I also reject the idea that each human being is a creature of God. It’s as simple as that. Now, if you have a different view, coming from a religious belief, obviously, you’re entitled to live your own life in accordance with your religious views, as long as you don’t interfere with others who do not share those views. What I would like to see is a society that, in its laws and public ethics, was not dominated by any specifically religious doctrines. Clearly, not everyone in this society or any other society that I’ve lived in does believe in God.
BA: So, how do you arrive at what is moral? What is your basic, underlying principle?
PS: We have to use our own thought and reflection to try and see what we would ourselves object to if it were done to us. To that extent, I could say that I am part of a religious tradition in that this is very like the golden rule. But, of course, the golden rule is not exclusive to the Judeo-Christian tradition. You find it in other religious traditions, too. I think it’s something that thinking humans can come to independently of religion—this idea of not wanting to do to others what you wouldn’t like to have done to yourself. Perhaps, as R. M. Hare, my teacher at Oxford University, argued, it is something that can be derived from the very concept of morality. In any case, I see it as a basis from which you can develop a moral outlook, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.
BA: But you also say that determining whether an act is moral depends on its consequences.
PS: I think that the idea of determining right and wrong by looking at the consequences is something that can flow from the idea of the golden rule, although certainly not all thinkers have taken it that way. But if you say, “If I were in that position, I wouldn’t want that done to me,” you are, in fact, looking at the consequences of the act. You’re not looking at whether or not it conforms with a rule.
BA: Just to be clear about this, yours is essentially a utilitarian position, that whether something is moral depends on what the likely outcome is. Right?
PS: Right. I don’t think you can decide whether an action is right or wrong without looking at what its effects are, what does it do, what impact does it have on people, animals, or the planet.
BA: Now, where does all this lead? You care very deeply and have written a great deal about relieving suffering. Talk about that a bit. Not only individual suffering, but in terms of the whole globe.
PS: I think that if we follow that idea of “doing unto others,” then, even though people have different sorts of preferences and different wants, one thing is pretty general: people do not want to suffer. They do not want extreme physical pain; they do not want emotional deprivation and suffering. That’s something that we share with nonhuman animals, broadly. And it’s also something that we in prosperous countries like the United States share with people in the developing world. Now, there are various ways in which we could quite easily reduce the amount of suffering that there is in the universe. One way relates to animals. We could stop doing a lot of things to animals which cause them to suffer, and which we don’t need to do. That would reduce their suffering. Another way relates to people in the world’s poorest countries. We could give some of the superfluous wealth that we fortunate people living in the affluent nations have, and use it to relieve the terrible suffering of people who are so poor that they are living on the edge of malnutrition and dying from easily preventable diseases. A third way of reducing suffering would be to assist people who are dying from diseases like cancer, who are in pain and distress, and who say, “Look, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to go on.” We could enable them to act upon their own decision about when they’ve had enough. The views of mine that have been most controversial all stem from this idea that we should reduce the amount of suffering in the world, if we can do so.
BA: Talk a little more about how it would be appropriate to help the old and the sick. When and why would it be all right to kill an old person—a sick, old person?
PS: It would be all right to kill a sick, old person when that person has asked to be killed, when that request has been made clearly and persistently; and when we are convinced that the person is in a sound, rational frame of mind and is making that decision for good reason—such as the fact that he or she has terminal cancer.
BA: I suppose the idea that has provoked the most controversy is your belief that it is all right under some circumstances to take the life of a newborn child. Would you say just as clearly and precisely as you possibly can what your position is on that?
PS: There are some disabled infants born with conditions so severe that doctors don’t really try to keep them alive. They allow them to die, essentially through benign neglect. But that can be a very slow process. In my view, if that decision is justified—and I think it can be—then we should not simply allow the child to die from neglect. With the consent and support of the parents, advised by their doctors—and only then—I think it would be justifiable to help that infant to die. It would be justifiable to take active steps to end that infant’s life swiftly and more humanely than by allowing death to come through dehydration, starvation, or an untreated infection.
BA: You said in a quotation that has showed up in many places: “Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.” Do you want to expand on that?
PS: As I said earlier, I use the term “person” to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. If that person is killed against his or her will, these desires are cut off, thwarted. For this reason, among others, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill a person than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Perhaps, for example, a chicken has no sense of existing over time. And that, I think, is one reason why it’s normally worse to kill a human being than to kill a chicken. But newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby—whether able-bodied or not—is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. It’s different. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents.
BA: Are you worried about a slippery slope there—that if it is permitted to kill disabled newborns, this might be extended in some way to others?
PS: We have to be aware of the slippery-slope problem, and we have to think carefully about it. But it’s not as if we’re now on flat ground, and accepting my view would be the first step onto a slippery slope. We’re already on that slope. For example, by allowing the termination of pregnancy, we have taken a step that violates the traditional view of the sanctity of human life. Many people will say, “Well, that’s why abortion is wrong.” But what about the reclassification of people as dead when the brain has irreversibly ceased to function? That has been accepted in this country for more than twenty years without any serious opposition, but it’s also a step down the slippery slope. Once you can reclassify a person as dead because the brain has ceased to function, even though the body is warm and the heart is beating, you could go further. With modern medical techniques, there’s no way in which we can just say, “You must never end the life of another human being.” We’re already doing it all the time, either by abortion, or by withdrawing or withholding life-supporting treatment, or by categorizing the being as brain-dead. So the question is not, “Can we stay off the slippery slope?” but, rather, “How can we best negotiate the slippery slope so as not to slide anywhere we don’t want to go?”
NELL BOYCE: Your grandfather and other members of your family died in the Holocaust. When people call you a Nazi, do you ignore it, or do you worry that some of your ideas may have unforeseen consequences?
PS: I find the throwing around of the “Nazi” accusation offensive. It sadly trivializes the enormity of the Nazi crimes. And it’s just absurd, because I come from a totally different political direction. I’m a social democrat, utterly opposed to racist policies and a totalitarian state. But do I reflect on the idea that some of the things I’ve said could lead in a direction that would not be a force for good? Yes, certainly I think about, say, the risk that my views may make society less supportive of people with disabilities. But I don’t think the right answer is to say: “Well, we must not challenge the traditional ethic of the sanctity of human life,” even though we can see that it’s actually founded on fictions or outmoded views of the world. I think that if you try to cover up the cracks in the ethic, you’re more likely to get a major crash in the long run.
NB: What kind of crash?
PS: The traditional ethic of the sanctity of life is being eroded on all sides by practices related to medical technology, such as advanced life-support systems. In the future, we may end up paying lip service to the ethic. Eventually people could simply abandon it, but they won’t have anything else to put in its place. The result could be complete confusion about what might make killing wrong in any circumstances. The traditional ethic is not sustainable. There are other ways of looking at the wrongness of killing, which show why killing is wrong in, for example, the case of any self-aware being who wants to go on living. A principle like that, widely understood, is more likely to be successful in preventing things like the Holocaust than sticking to an ethic that really makes sense only within the context of a Judeo-Christian worldview.
NB: Do you feel that any of your ideas have been misrepresented?
PS: Yes, especially my views regarding euthanasia for disabled infants. The misrepresentation is of various kinds, but it usually comes from taking a sentence or two from Practical Ethics, which was written as a textbook for university use, and suggesting that this is my view or that I think it should immediately be put into practice as public policy. Very often what I am doing is following the implications of various ethical views and getting students to think about whether they accept these implications.
NB: But haven’t you argued that parents should be allowed to kill a disabled infant or even one with a treatable disease such as hemophilia if it allows them to have a child with a greater chance of happiness?
PS: Hemophilia is one of the misrepresented examples I was referring to. The quotation everyone uses is plucked from a section in Practical Ethics in which I was developing the implications of a particular view of utilitarianism to get people to think about the differences between that view and an alternative view. I wasn’t suggesting as a matter of public policy that parents should be allowed to kill infants with hemophilia. In our society today, that would be wrong. Hemophilia is not the disastrous condition that it once was, and it is hard to imagine that parents would really wish to kill a child who had it. But if, for some strange reason, they did think that they could not cope with their child, it would not be difficult to find a childless couple who would be delighted to adopt such a child. Killing it should not be an option.
BA: Another group of people concerned by some of your ideas have been handicapped people who, perhaps totally mistakenly, see in some of the things that you have written about a possible threat to people like them.
PS: That’s a misunderstanding of my views, and a particularly unfortunate one, because it has caused distress to some people with disabilities. I have written that every disabled person should be supported in trying to live the best possible life that he or she can, as long as he or she wants to do so—as with all of the rest of us. And I regret, in fact, that the facilities for disabled people are not better than they are, that we don’t give them more support. It’s certainly nothing against people with disabilities that motivates my position. It is, rather, a desire to avoid suffering that is unnecessary, that can be avoided, right at the outset of life, at the stage of a newborn infant. That is obviously not a threat to any person with a disability who is capable of understanding anything about my position.
NB: Has your experience with your mother, who is profoundly disabled with Alzheimer’s disease, influenced your views about creatures with a limited capacity for self-awareness?
PS: I couldn’t say that it’s totally unrelated, but I don’t think it’s had an impact. My mother is not suffering from her condition, because she lacks the self-awareness that would lead her to suffer from it. So it’s not like the cases of euthanasia that I’ve written about.
NB: Years ago, an infant was born in Bloomington, Indiana, with both Down syndrome and a defective digestive tract which the parents decided not to surgically correct, so the child died. Are similar decisions being made now to kill infants through neglect?
PS: Probably there is now a more widespread acceptance that people with Down syndrome can have good lives and that parents should be encouraged to allow surgery even if they are going to give the child up for adoption. But certainly decisions to withhold life-prolonging medical treatment still get made in cases where the surgery would be complicated and the outcome uncertain, or where the underlying conditions are more severely disabling. In the United States, there is on the whole a much more aggressive treatment of these cases than there would be in Britain, Australia, or many other countries.
NB: Are you satisfied with the situation?
PS: No, I’m not satisfied. I don’t think it’s a good situation because the law doesn’t really clarify what doctors are entitled to do. There are certain things going on which are legally dubious but which may be right. The fact that doctors have to do the right thing in a secretive way is not a good thing, because it means that doctors and parents can’t be totally open with each other.
BA: Let’s extend this now to animals. Just sketch, if you would, the moral case for what you’ve called “animal liberation.”
PS: The case for animal liberation is very simple. It’s that animals can feel and have interests. There is no reason why we should give less consideration to their interests than we give to similar interests of members of our own species. The fact that animals are not members of our species is, in itself, no more morally relevant than the fact that a human being is not a member of my race or not a member of my sex.
BA: And, again, back to those qualities we spoke about earlier?
PS: The key quality that animals share with us is the capacity to feel pain and the capacity to suffer. And, therefore, they have an interest in not suffering. Some of them may share other qualities. Chimpanzees and orangutans may be “persons” in the sense that I mentioned. They may be capable of seeing themselves as existing over time. A lot of animals—including some animals we eat, like chickens and fish—may not be persons. I’m not sure about whether cows and pigs qualify as persons—I would prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. But what’s clear is that they can all suffer. And when we raise them for food, we ignore their capacities for suffering. We use them just as things, and we frustrate their most important needs in order to satisfy some quite minor needs of our own.
BA: And this is what you’ve called “speciesism?” Tell me about “speciesism.”
PS: Speciesism is a term that I’ve used to make a parallel between racism and sexism on the one hand, and our attitude to animals on the other. The attitude of white racists to Africans was: “You’re not a member of my race. Therefore, it’s okay for me to capture you, to enslave you, to use you as a living tool to work my plantations.” When you think about what we do to animals, it’s quite similar. We say, “You’re not a member of my species. Therefore, it’s okay for me to capture you, to breed you, to make you into a thing, to use you as a tool for producing food or eggs or milk—or to use you as an experimental tool in the laboratory.” The fact that a being is not a member of our species does not, in itself, justify doing any of those things to it.
BA: You referred to medical experiments, but that’s a particularly important part of it, isn’t it?
PS: No, not really. I think the use of animals for food is a greater moral wrong than the use of our animals in experiments, because it’s clearly less necessary, and it involves a much larger number of animals.
BA: But on the question particularly of the medical experimentation, when you get into consideration of the consequences, one might be a cure for a disease that would relieve the suffering of a great many persons. Right?
PS: It might be. I have never said that I think all animal experimentation should stop immediately. If you can show that that is the only way of achieving a goal like curing a major disease, then I would say we should seek alternative ways of getting to the same goal, but in the meanwhile, I would not campaign to stop those particular experiments. But what I do say is that, in general, animals have been used just as things, just as tools. They’ve been cheap. No one has cared about their interests. It’s just been a matter of, “Let’s order up another 200 mice or rats or guinea pigs for next Monday morning and try this out on them.” So, that’s where the speciesism comes in—the fact that we’re prepared to do this to animals. We condemn doing that to humans, irrespective of their mental level.
NB: You’ve said that research on a chimp can be justified only when the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would also be justifiable. So would it be OK to use brain-damaged humans?
PS: You would have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. I wouldn’t absolutely rule it out. The point of what I said is that we are incredibly more protective of human beings than we are of nonhuman animals. Getting people to make that comparison makes them think about what kind of case for experimentation would be strong enough for us to say, “Yes, we really are prepared to do that experiment on a brain-damaged human.” If the case is not strong enough to justify that conclusion, then how can it be strong enough to justify doing the research on a chimpanzee who is at a higher mental level than the human we have just said may not be experimented upon?
NB: As a pioneer of the modern animals rights movement, how do you now feel about activists sending scientists razor blades through the mail?
PS: I think that it’s a deplorable thing to do. It risks serious damage to the movement because the movement’s strength is the fact that it takes a strong moral stand and that it has a really good moral case. By using these tactics, the risk is that the movement will be seen simply as crazy extremists trying to force their views on other people.
BA: You’ve been called a lot of things that I’m sure you’ve learned to deal with, but it still must sting. Somewhere I read that somebody had called you the most dangerous man in the world today, and somebody else had used the phrase “Professor Death.” Why do you think what you’re saying has provoked such passion?
PS: What I’m saying is controversial. As we’ve been discussing, it goes against an ethic that has been around for a long time. That ethic is in the process of change, but I have, perhaps, brought out a little more clearly and bluntly than most the way in which that ethic needs to continue to change. And I’ve refused to try and disguise what I’m saying behind a veil which says, for example, “We’re not killing; we’re merely letting die,” or “We’re not cutting beating hearts out of living human beings, because the brains of these humans have ceased to function and so they are dead.” My refusal to draw that delicate veil of euphemism over things to make them more acceptable is a large part of the reason why I get all this opposition while other people, whose conclusions are largely in agreement with mine, do not.
BA: How does it make you feel?
PS: I really do not like some of the things that I’ve been called. I find them unfair and inflammatory. They’re basically media sound bites. But in so far as it helps me to get my ideas across to a wider audience—and it certainly does that—I can see that it has its good side as well.
NB: What projects are you working on these days?
PS: I am completing something that is completely different, a book about my grandfather, who lived in Vienna from the late nineteenth century until the Holocaust. I find it fascinating to go back to that period and piece together the life of a man I never knew. I’m getting close to the end of it now. That, plus the move to Princeton, has made it a good time to stop and decide what I really want to be working on next. I’ll probably do something relating to genetics. I’m also interested in some of the global issues, like justice and world hunger, climate change, and the ethics of a global free market.